Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen
Betsy struggled to help her father with his tie. “You’ve got to hold still, Daddy.”
“Oh, what’s the use?” He was in his black suit, his best, which he hardly ever wore, but Charlotte had insisted he pack it, just in case, and Betsy had insisted just as forcefully that he wear it now, and submit to the hair styling, manicure, and other grooming she performed, so that he might either win back his wife, or destroy her in the trying.
“Hold on. . .just a second. . .there!” She stepped down off the stool and appraised him. “You look very, very handsome, Daddy.”
“Do I? Where’s the mirror?”
“Don’t you worry about a mirror. You just do as I say, and we’ll be one big happy family again. You’ll see.” She grabbed his sleeve and yanked down his arm, popping his finger out of his mouth, where he’d been biting a nail. “Do you remember the script?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll be fine. Just remember: no prisoners.”
She reached up to brush the last, imaginary particles of dust from his shoulder, then smacked him twice on the back of his leg to send him on his way.
Aloysius—or “Barbarian Swine”, as the Drig brood liked to call him—had been dispatched to the other end of the hotel via a letter Betsy had forged, from a sample of Voot’s handwriting, purloined by Eric from the front desk right under Curtis/Thaddeus’s nose, summoning him to wait for a fatally important message in a cubbyhole under a set of stairs. Thus was Charlotte left on her own in their love nest of iniquity. Arthur walked in, without knocking, to find her at a desk, in a nightdress, gripping her jaws in thought.
“Artie!”
“Charlotte.”
“You’ve got the wrong room!”
“No—I came to see you.”
“Oh. . .I see.”
He sat down on the desk, looking down at her, at such a height that she was forced to confront his (admittedly trousered) crotch, although this configuration was unintentional and one of which he remained unconscious.
“Why, Charlotte?”
“Pardon?”
“Why?”
“Do you mean, ‘Why am I cheating on you with Aloysius?’”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. You must admit we’re still on the same plane of communication—the way you inferred what I meant, I mean. Don’t you see we belong together?”
“Oh, Artie.” She rubbed his knee consolingly, while, in so doing, gently pressing it back to meet its brother knee.
“By ‘Oh, Artie’, do you mean, ‘It’s too late for that now, and besides, we was never really in love with each other, anyway’?”
“Well, yes, that’s exactly it.”
“See?” Arthur exclaimed. “This! This is what I mean! It’s like we share the same mind! Except, of course, that my mind doesn’t lust after the waiter, and doesn’t concern itself with shallow trifles of fashion, isn’t regularly debilitated by a tangle of certifiable neuroses, and so forth. But aside from those few things, we’re basically the same!”
“Aloysius might be back any minute.”
“By that, you mean, ‘I’m sorry, Arthur—we had some good times, I sacrificed my youth to you and you sired some wonderful children by me, but people change, people grow, for better or for worse, as it were, there’s no going back to the past, the past is merely a dead echo of today, the past is a dead man unlucky to have lived after the epoch of miracles which might have visited upon him a resurrection, and so, in summation, I thank you for the mildly diverting years in which I fulfilled my soulless debt to society, but now, for the first time since I were a girl, I’d like to live me life for me own pleasure, and me own pleasure alone, and to hell with the damage sustained by me reputation, to hell with biblical injunction, and to hell with you, Arthur’? Is that what you meant?”
“It’s uncanny!” she admitted. “You’ve got it precisely!”
“Well,” he sighed, standing down from the desk, readjusting his penis within his trousers, and pulling out a folded piece of paper from his pocket, “Betsy warned me that an appeal to your better nature wouldn’t work, but I felt I had to try.”
“What’s that?” she asked, indicating the paper.
“This paper?”
“Yes—the paper I’m pointing to and asking ‘What’s that’ about.”
“Oh—this paper. Yes. Well, perhaps the best way to explain it would be, rather than taking up any more of your precious time with a longwinded explanation, simply to show you.”
“I agree.”
“So we agree—good.”
She nodded. Silence.
“So. . .”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to show me?”
“You mean—the paper?”
“The paper, yes.”
“Oh! Yes, right, I’d nearly forgot! Ha! For some reason, some strange reason, I’d got it into my head that I’d already shown it to you!”
“But you hadn’t.”
“No! I hadn’t! But I thought I had!”
“But you hadn’t.”
“No! Ha!”
She snatched the paper out of his hand and opened it up. On it was a crude but discernible sketch of her, naked, engaged in illicit congress with Aloysius (also naked).
“This is me,” she realised.
“Yes—that one, there; the woman.” He pointed, to clarify.
“Who drew this?” she asked.
With not a little pride, he admitted it had been he. “I’ve been taking drawing lessons, you see. With some of the others. I’ve drawn this, and many, many others, of you, from my memory of your naked body and erotic preferences in the bedchamber.”
“How did you render Aloysius so—exactly?” she wondered.
“Ah. Impressed, hm? Well—a small bribe to one of his colleagues, who had bathed naked with him in a local pond on summer nights, and was more than forthcoming with the salacious details.”
“But the act you represent here—it’s revolting.”
“But, I believe, none the less true.”
“And what do you intend to do with this?”
“With what—the picture?”
“Obviously, the picture, yes.”
“I’d intended to present it to the two of you, framed, as a wedding present.”
She stared at him.
“No. That was a joke. In reality, this and all the others will, I’m afraid, find their way to periodicals, family members, trees around our town, church notice boards, and anywhere else I can paste them, once we get out of here.”
A faint ripple of girlhood shame reached out its beseeching fingers to her from far back in her memory, but she drowned it out by cackling, “You may do what you like. I’ve discarded all pride like last season’s ugly stole.” She stood up, and, while she had traditionally been at best two-thirds her husband’s height, she suddenly seemed as tall as he. “What’s more, I shall positively revel in universal knowledge of my debauch. I demand the world know, and pay heed! I wish to stain the history books of tomorrow with reports of the most shameless harlotry the world has ever known! Yes, Arthur, draw, draw away, print, publish, and tell the world how your wife has ruined her body by its brazen crucifixion on her lover’s cross!”
Realising that he had well and truly lost what, it turned out, he did not really want to have, Arthur bowed and withdrew.